Trick the Tricksters in Russia - Why a Meat Processor Got Ransomed

[As Heard on WTAG, WHJJ, and WHYN 2021-06-01. Automated transcript follows.]

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Good morning, everybody doing well this morning course, Craig Peterson here, and I was talking this morning about two different things. One, and this sounds like one of these marketing things in part of these ads, right? One weird trick while I got one. This is amazing. This is from Brian Krebs and it is a trick that will stop most, if not all, frankly, Russian based.

[00:00:28] Ransomware and even hackers. So we went into that. I'm going to put more about that in my newsletter this weekend. So make sure you are on that list. Craig peterson.com/subscribe.

[00:00:42] And we also talked a little bit about this newest hack against the largest meat company. In the world, if you can believe that.

[00:00:53] Absolutely huge. So both of those of this morning with Mr. Jim Polito, here we go.

[00:01:01] Jim Polito: [00:01:01] Hey, this guy is on top of it all. I'm talking about our tech talk guru, Craig Peterson, and nobody. Smarter than this man. And he joins us now. Good morning, Craig. Hey, good morning. It's Jimmy P how you doing? I'm good, Greg. Thank you.

[00:01:20] Hey, can I just, I want to ask you about this simple trick that will stop most Russian hackers. And it's not hiding a bottle of vodka somewhere. No, the it's about Microsoft. I want to ask you about now that now what ransomware and a meat packing facility. So they went after power grids. They went after water.

[00:01:43] Now they want to go after our food. They're there, they went after the oil pipeline. They want meet what's this all about. They really are what we're talking about right now. The major organized hackers. So the guys that have gotten together that are working together that really want to go after targets that have money.

[00:02:06] Yeah. And even though those say things like we don't, I want to really affect the us economy. We really don't want to hurt people. That's what it tends to do in this case. This is a big company. It headquarters in Greeley, Colorado. At least the us headquarters are, they are both. They have operations in new, excuse me, new north America and Australia.

[00:02:30] And they noticed it. Now this. Is a beautiful example, right? There is nothing, 100% effective against a determined hacker. However, they noticed that what these hackers were doing. So they took the name of it is JBS USA. So world's largest meat supplier. They took immediate. Action. They automatically suspended all of these it systems and other systems that might be effected.

[00:03:02] They immediately notified the authorities, the FBI. That's what we do. Bri, bring them in as well. They brought in all of their it professionals that got them all together and they brought in some good third party experts like yours, truly. I tend to try and figure out what the situation was and how do we resolve it now it looks like it probably spread quite a ways inside this meat packing plant, because the company is saying that their backup servers were not affected.

[00:03:35] And they're working with an incident response firm to get the operations back as soon as possible. I think they're going to be back very quickly. But these bad guys are not gone. I mentioned dark side. These are the hackers that went after the colonial pipeline, probably part of the solar winds attack on and on.

[00:03:56] And they shut down that one operation, the dark side operation, but it also looks like. We may have been able to shut them down. We won't get it, all the details right now, but here's here's another side to all of this. We need to know when it's happening. So kudos to JBS USA. They knew when it was happening, they knew you and that's something by the way I'm working on, I'm actually starting a business.

[00:04:22] That's what it's going to do. I decided that's the most important thing, because people are not willing to spend real money on the right types of hardware, types of software, but let's look at what's happening on the network anyway, separate issue entirely. But the Biden administration.

[00:04:39] Refuses now to say that these dark side attacks and the the, what ultimately led to the solar winds and potentially colonial pipeline, they've been saying all along Russia, and now Microsoft came out and Microsoft is a company that the whole attack vector went through solar winds, which affected every American.

[00:05:04] Every one of us that attack because of the companies we deal with solar winds, I attack according to the byte administration came from Russia, or Russia. However Microsoft said we have confirmed it's China. And Microsoft has been saying that now for weeks. And we men president Biden was asked about this as was at a press conference.

[00:05:29]Jean, what Sakhi. And they say now nothing about it. They won't say that it's Russia. They won't say that it's China. If we don't know who's attacking, that's where it's coming from. And frankly, retaliate against them. We're never going to stop this. We're talking with Craig Peterson, our tech talk girl.

[00:05:51]I'm glad you're sounding the alarm and all this, and buying is going to meet with Putin. He's got a summit with Putin coming up within the next two weeks. It'd be nice if he would be on top of this. And say, just cut it out. Remember Barack Obama, when it went through the election hacking, he was telling a, but remember he said, I told Putin to cut it out.

[00:06:15]Yeah, exactly. But it's not potent. It looks like it's absolutely China. Yeah. All right. Great, lovely. Speaking of let's go back to Putin. A simple trick can lock out Russian hackers. You sent me this information. What is this? Yeah, I'm going to put this in the newsletter coming up on Saturday this week.

[00:06:38] So if you miss the details to make sure you get the newsletter, you can just get it on my website. This is absolutely true. You and I have talked Jim before about where the hacks are coming from and how we think some of these hacked are definitely Russian because. They're not attacking cause Dr. Stan Ukraine, all of these former Soviet countries, right?

[00:07:03]Yeah. They're there. They're taking care of their own. Yeah, they absolutely are. And they don't want to get in trouble either. Russia. Doesn't exactly take hacking lightly. If you have them or you hack one of their all-in guard buddies, they will come after you and you don't want to end up in a rush Russian prison.

[00:07:24] So that's the theory behind this. So here's the, this is simple, everybody. This is simple and I'll send you some links to it. All you have to do is install what are called a virtual keyboard on your windows machine. So for instance, I'm, multi-lingual I speak English and I speak French. Yeah. So I, cause I, my, my schooling was in print schools, so I have installed on my computer, a virtual French keyboard, so I can say, okay, now I'm going to be typing a note off to my friend over in Paris.

[00:07:55] And so I am going to now do an overlay on my keyboard. And so now I can use all those funny accents as things are French, too. So here's what the trick is. They look this nasty where most of it, most of the ransomware goes ahead and look to see if you have a. Russian virtual keyboard installed.

[00:08:19] Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. So it looks for some other languages to Ukrainian Belarusian, to jock and Armenian and some others, but Russian keyboard is the easy one. So here is a work around from getting hacked by some of this ransomware installed. A virtual Russian keyboard on your computer and what'll happen is if it gets the ransomware on it, the first thing it does is it looks to see, is this potentially someone in the Commonwealth of independent states, which of course are the former Soviet territories.

[00:08:57] And it's also, if you have a Russian keyboard, it will immediately stop what it's doing. Wow. That's simple. Yeah, that is cool. I'm sure they'll find a workaround, but in the meantime, that's pretty cool. How do you, no, it won't stop at all right. But yeah, go ahead and no, how do you do it? How do you install the virtual keyboard?

[00:09:21]You can actually do a duck, go search on it and it will show you there. One of articles, but it's just, it's a virtual keyboard, right? So if you've, if you speak Spanish, you've probably got an English and a Spanish keyboard on your computer. You probably already know how to do it. It's really rather simple.

[00:09:38] You can go into the settings, you can load the Russian keyboard in your, and you're off and running. But apparently is according to the research I'm looking at right now done by mandate act and a couple of others. This will help you against almost all of them. So just a Cyrillic keyboard. You can also, there's a specific registry edits you can do.

[00:09:58]We won't get into that just to keyboards. All you have to do it. Duck, go by the way I have been using it considerably. And there is such a difference between searching on duck, go versus searching with Google. I should do a podcast and do a side by side and yeah. In the blog, put the pictures of just putting in, one, two words and seeing what you get for results in Google and then seeing what you get for results in duck, go doesn't use politics, which is great.

[00:10:32] No, yeah, it's it is very good. There's another one you might want to look at. It's called Quan, Q w a N T. But I prefer dark.co. Wow. Greg, this has been as usual. Illuminating. Fascinating. How goes the recuperation of your lovely bride? It's going quite well. She's very frustrated. I would be right.

[00:10:55] And she can't do anything, and she's just sitting there, but thank goodness we have one of these chairs that even injects you, which helped initially. But now she's starting to get a little itchy and I'm wanting to get up and go around and do things, which is a really good sign. So my fingers are crossed.

[00:11:13] Yeah, I think she'll do well. It was the femur, right? Even though humorous funny bone, the big bone in your arm, how much fall. Yeah. Yeah, because there's a ball on top while her ball was split completely into two pieces, it was looking at attached scan. It's just incredible. It was such a mass for the top of her arm, ended up in, down in her armpit and it was very painful.

[00:11:43] Yeah. I thought it was the leg. I'm sorry, but I'm glad to hear she's doing better. I'm sure she's going to have trouble going through a metal detector for the rest of her life. Yeah. So anyway, we'll give her our best and Craig, how do folks get in touch with you? Okay. So I'm going to send out information on this keyboard trick and it's simple trick, right?

[00:12:06] Just like a marketing line. Correct. But it really is. I'm going to send it out on this weekend as part of my newsletter, like I do every week. You get that by going to Craig peterson.com/subscribe, Craig Peterson, S O N. Excellent Craig, thank you as usual. And we look forward to talking with you next week.

[00:12:28] All right, take care. Thanks. Hey, when we return a final word, you're listening to the Jim Palito show your safe space.